Nathan A. Scott, Junior. was an American scholar who helped establish the modern field of theology and literature and who helped found the well-known Doctor of Philosophy program in that field at the University of Chicago.
Education
Scott"s innovation in literary criticism was to reject the New Critics" idea that poems should be studied as autonomous objects and to remind scholars that authors" personal beliefs are crucial for understanding their texts. In this way, he also returned criticism to a study of the way literature represents the outside world.
Career
Scott also published seventeen books, in addition to publishing articles and reviews and editing editions. He has likewise been the subject of numerous articles and books Scott earned his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Michigan in 1944, his Bachelor of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary in 1946, and his Doctor of Philosophy at Columbia University in 1949, having studied under Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Jacques Barzun.
He taught at Howard University in Washington, District of Columbia He taught at Chicago from 1955 to 1977, when he moved to University of Virginia.
He also served as a President of the American Academy of Religion.